The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
The production and marketing costs of the high-end alcoholic beverages, such as vintage wines and spirits, lead to high selling prices. These high prices generate, as often for the luxury products, fraud as well as acts of counterfeiting. Thus, there is regularly observed the appearance on the market of counterfeit bottles, that is to say having the external appearance of a genuine bottle, but filled with a beverage of much lower quality than the quality of the original product. This phenomenon of counterfeiting is particularly significant for high-end wines and spirits, such as cognac.
For economic, safety and brand image reasons, the concerned producers are vigorously fighting against these acts of fraud and counterfeiting. This struggle is reflected in particular in the manufacture of bottles including increasingly advanced anti-counterfeiting devices, aiming at preventing the exact reproduction of a bottle and/or its reuse.
However, counterfeiters also make constant efforts and are able to reproduce genuine bottles with such faithfulness that it becomes very difficult to distinguish a counterfeit bottle from a genuine bottle. In other cases, counterfeiters recover used genuine bottles, which are then filled with a non-genuine product.
In addition, this question of authentication arises in various places related to different actors in the distribution chain (resellers, distributors, etc.).